Salary Increase Requests
If you get a chance, take a look at the salary increases in the Governor's introduced budget amendments.
Some are rather substantial. If they were tied to performance, I could see the reason to pay them more. DPOR Director $98 k to $125? Superintendent of Public Instruction from $157k to $190K?
I also cannot understand how the Director of the New College Institute gets $160,000 a year and the Presidents of UVa, VaTech, VCU get $174,419. I know that these presidents have additional sources of compensation from their respective universities, but why does the NCI director make $18,000 more than the President of Longwood and $16,000 more than the President of JMU? And why does the Director of SCHEV make $170 thousand at all?
They are all very good people and quite competent, but what are we paying them to produce and should we begin to offer incentives for higher levels of performance. I would offer the superintendent of public instruction A LOT more if he could get the graduation rates up - as an example. Billy Cannaday is an EXCELLENT superintendent and I know we are not going to agree on certain issues in education and I am by no means picking on k-12 and higher ed, but the questions should be asked - what are we getting for our money? and what could we be getting for our money.
If we said get graduation rates of 9th graders to X% instead of Y%, how much would that be worth?
Over at VDOT, we are taking the Commissioner's salary from $163,591 to $187,460. Okay. I get that construction and maintenance costs have increased a lot but we just hired Ekern this year.
The point is this - We should review the whole structure of executive level compensation and put more incentives in the packages that we offer. Then we can hopefully do the same for more of state employees rather than trying to justify across the board increases that basically end up paying for across the board increase is the cost of living with absolutely zero impact whatsoever on performance.
Today the Governor announced the new website about performance and that is a very good thing. The next step is to tie pay to that performance objectively as possible.
Some are rather substantial. If they were tied to performance, I could see the reason to pay them more. DPOR Director $98 k to $125? Superintendent of Public Instruction from $157k to $190K?
I also cannot understand how the Director of the New College Institute gets $160,000 a year and the Presidents of UVa, VaTech, VCU get $174,419. I know that these presidents have additional sources of compensation from their respective universities, but why does the NCI director make $18,000 more than the President of Longwood and $16,000 more than the President of JMU? And why does the Director of SCHEV make $170 thousand at all?
They are all very good people and quite competent, but what are we paying them to produce and should we begin to offer incentives for higher levels of performance. I would offer the superintendent of public instruction A LOT more if he could get the graduation rates up - as an example. Billy Cannaday is an EXCELLENT superintendent and I know we are not going to agree on certain issues in education and I am by no means picking on k-12 and higher ed, but the questions should be asked - what are we getting for our money? and what could we be getting for our money.
If we said get graduation rates of 9th graders to X% instead of Y%, how much would that be worth?
Over at VDOT, we are taking the Commissioner's salary from $163,591 to $187,460. Okay. I get that construction and maintenance costs have increased a lot but we just hired Ekern this year.
The point is this - We should review the whole structure of executive level compensation and put more incentives in the packages that we offer. Then we can hopefully do the same for more of state employees rather than trying to justify across the board increases that basically end up paying for across the board increase is the cost of living with absolutely zero impact whatsoever on performance.
Today the Governor announced the new website about performance and that is a very good thing. The next step is to tie pay to that performance objectively as possible.
posted by Chris Saxman at
10:52 AM
3 Comments:
Why is the VDOT commissioner getting a proposed 14% salary increase? That is a huge salary jump. Is the Virginia highway infrastructure 14% better than last year?
By
Dirk van Assendelft, at 1/04/2007 10:03 PM
I thought VITA was supposed to be able to save money by entering the deal with Northrop Grumman and they were not going to ask for any more from the budget. Also, VITA is restructuring the fees according to their latest newsletter and some agencies will see an increase in overall expenses.
So... Why is the Governor recommending an additional 4 million to stabilize the operating funds? The bottom line is that they still get another 4 million from the budget and even more from the agencies, right? What am I missing?
"The Governor recommends an additional $4 million for technology agencies. The bulk of these funds will be used to stabilize VITA’s general fund operating budget. Currently, VITA’s operating budget is set to be drawn from VITA-initiated operational efficiency savings achieved in agencies, but with the Northrop Grumman agreement, VITA will no longer have control of, nor be able to, track the savings."
By
Lucy Jones, at 1/05/2007 2:34 AM
The debate on VITA will continue to evolve. It is still early and like most major initiatives VITA will be reviewed, reformed to move in the intended direction. That is why we have put in on the operational review team schedule.
By
Chris Saxman, at 1/05/2007 9:42 AM
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